Remembering the Kalamazoo River Spill 12 Years Later

by Jeffrey Insko | Jul 25, 2022 | 1 comment

Today marks twelve years since Enbridge Line 6b ruptured near Marshall, Michigan and spilled a million gallons of diluted bitumen into the Kalamazoo River. As of this writing, I haven’t seen any acknowledgment of the grim anniversary from Enbridge, even though they still to this day like to talk about how they’ll never forget it. They even created some creepy iconography that they apparently give to their employees as a reminder of the incident. However, they seem to have a little trouble remembering the date of the rupture. The remembrance link above and this Enbridge’s timeline commemorate and begin, respectively, with July 26. It’s a weird and disturbing habit, this attempt to remember by trying to makes us all forget.

More importantly, this matter of the date of the spill offers a cautionary tale: if Enbridge can’t be trusted to tell the simple truth about what they claim is one of the most important events in the company’s history, how can regulatory bodies (and concerned citizens) in Michigan and Wisconsin trust there assurances with regard to their proposed re-routes of Line 5?

So for a corrective commemoration of the date of the spill, I’m re-posting a blog from way back in 2014.

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from July 29, 2014

A History Lesson for Brad Shamla

Looks like Enbridge needs another history lesson. To mark last week’s anniversary of the Marshall spill, Enbridge VP Brad Shamla penned an editorial that was published in the Battle Creek Enquirer and the Detroit News. A version of the op-ed also appeared as a “letter” (that is, a paid advertisement) in the Detroit Free Press (and probably elsewhere, we’re not sure).

It’s a fine-sounding letter, carefully crafted, we’re sure, by a whole committee of people in the vast Enbridge public relations department. The trouble is, it’s also disingenuous, starting with its very first sentence. See if you can spot the problem:

July 26, 2010, is a day that no one at Enbridge will ever forget.

Yep, that’s right: in an article whose central point is memory and commemoration, the importance of always remembering what happened in Marshall, Shamla gets the date of the spill wrong. July 26, 2010 is NOT the day the “Line 6B pipeline failed near Marshall.” As everybody knows, the failure occurred on July 25.

So what gives? Is it possible Shamla doesn’t know this? Is it merely a typographical mistake? Or might it be, once again, a willful distortion of the facts on the part of Enbridge? You won’t be surprised to learn that we think it’s the latter. Shamla (and Enbridge) date the spill on July 26, presumably, because it allows them to forget what happened the day before, when Enbridge ignored evidence of a problem with the line, ignored its own safety protocols, turned up the pressure on the line, and gushed oil out of the ruptured seam in Line 6B for 17 hours. Here’s the National Transportation Safety Board’s account of what happened:

On Sunday, July 25, 2010, at 5:58 p.m., eastern daylight time, a segment of a 30-inch-diameter pipeline (Line 6B), owned and operated by Enbridge Incorporated (Enbridge) ruptured in a wetland in Marshall, Michigan. The rupture occurred during the last stages of a planned shutdown and was not discovered or addressed for over 17 hours. During the time lapse, Enbridge twice pumped additional oil (81 percent of the total release) into Line 6B during two startups; the total release was estimated to be 843,444 gallons of crude oil. The oil saturated the surrounding wetlands and flowed into the Talmadge Creek and the Kalamazoo River. Local residents self-evacuated from their houses, and the environment was negatively affected.

So far from remembering the Marshall spill, Shamla and Enbridge are actually re-writing history in order to conveniently erase some key facts from the historical record– facts that point directly to the real causes of the spill and its severity.

This revisionism is part and parcel with all of the new measures Shamla touts as Enbridge’s response to the lessons they learned from the spill. Mainly, those measures consist of throwing a lot of money around. Don’t get us wrong, some of the measures Shamla describes seem like good things. But not one of them gets at the core of the problem. Not one of them addresses or acknowledges the principle reason (according to the NTSB) the Marshall spill was so very bad: Enbridge’s “culture of deviance” from following its own safety protocols. Prior to the Marshall spill, Enbridge had all the tools it needed to prevent the spill: detection equipment that found anomalies, control center rules that could have shut down the pipe right away. But Enbridge disregarded or ignored those things. Spending money on new equipment, putting in place new rules and protocols isn’t going to matter one little bit if Enbridge doesn’t change its culture. The former is easy; the latter is very difficult– even more difficult if you’re unwilling even to acknowledge the problem.

“We will not forget the Marshall incident,” Shamla tells Michiganders, which may be true. Unfortunately, the incident Enbridge has “memorialized,” the incident Enbridge vows not to forget appears to be a fictionalized version of the incident, only loosely based on actual events. 

The Latest from the MPSC: Mixed Feelings

by Jeffrey Insko | Jul 8, 2022 | 4 comments

By now, you’ve probably heard the news: the Michigan Public Service Commission yesterday declined to rule definitively on Enbridge’s application to re-route a portion of Line 5 beneath the Straits of Mackinac inside a concrete tunnel. Instead, the Commission reopened the case and asked Enbridge to provide additional information.

I spent part of the day reading the Commission’s order and, honestly, it’s hard to know what to make of it, other than one thing: in one way or another, this was inevitable. As I (and plenty of others) have said from day one, Enbridge’s timelines for their silly tunnel project have always been completely ludicrous (more on this in a minute).

Most Line 5 opponents have taken this as good news. FLOW’s Jim Olson, for example, calls it “a step toward victory for the public and Great Lakes.” And Oil & Water Don’t Mix applauded what they called “the Commisioners’ prudent order.” I very much understand these responses. But I confess I’m also a little torn. On the one hand, the order basically castigates Enbridge, subtly, for failing to provide sufficient evidence in support of their safety assurances or of their compliance with some basic conditions in their three agreements with the State (agreements that were essentially big fat gifts from the Michigan legislature). What measures has Enbridge taken to enhance the safety of Line 5? Did Enbridge conduct the Close Internal Survey they agreed to? What were the results of their inspection of the coatings on the dual pipelines? Where is their work plan to repair bare metal on the pipelines? The record doesn’t say; Enbridge was silent on all this and more. Why? Is this just their usual sloppiness? More disregard for state authority and the seriousness of the proceedings? Or do they have something to hide?

Whatever the case, the Commission is certainly right to call Enbridge out on this lack of information. On the other hand, the Commission’s order essentially grants Enbridge a do-over. I find this rather baffling. After all, Enbridge had ample opportunity—two full years of hearings and filings—to present their case. But, as these question marks demonstrate, they clearly failed to make a satisfactory case regarding these important safety matters. On that basis alone, the Commission should have simply denied the application, rather than giving Enbridge a second chance. This just feels to me instead like the same situation we’ve observed repeatedly over the past decade: no matter how bad their behavior, Enbridge almost always gets a free pass.

I’m also feeling some ambivalence about the focus of the reopened proceedings. That is, it is certainly a very good thing that the Commissioners are taking seriously the potential dangers and risks of the tunnel project. They’ve asked Enbridge to provide additional information regarding its leak detection systems and the potential for fire or explosion in the tunnel. Yet the implication seems to be that the Commission’s final decision is likely to turn on the answers to these questions, as if they are the most important considerations in the matter. But from the point of view of other, far more important objections to the project—namely, climate change and indigenous sovereignty—leak detection and explosion risk are neither here nor there. Even if Enbridge could somehow prove that the tunnel is 100% safe and completely risk-free (which they can’t), it’s still a terribly bad idea. The last thing our overheated planet needs right now is a billion dollar investment in new fossil fuel infrastructure. Full stop. I’m worried the Commission doesn’t see it that way.

Then again, even that point might be moot because, as I’ve always maintained, the tunnel is a chimera; it’s never going to happen anyway. This is just another of what has been and will continue to be a very long series of delays, pushing the fantasy tunnel into an ever-receding future. And that suits Enbridge just fine, since they don’t really want the tunnel either. So I guess this is the last way in which my feelings about this non-decision are mixed: on the one hand, it’s certainly better than approval. On the other hand, it doesn’t hasten us, as it should have, toward the resolution of the matter we all want to see: a final, decisive, and permanent shut down of Line 5.